Professor Marcela Votruba

Professor Marcela Votruba is Professor of Ophthalmology and an Honorary Consultant in Ophthalmology at Cardiff University and the University Hospital of Wales and Head of the School of Optometry & Vision Sciences at Cardiff University.

She was awarded an Open Scholarship from The Queen’s College, Oxford to read Physiological Sciences and Medicine. She obtained a PhD at UCL in ophthalmic genetics. She has held Wellcome Trust and MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowships and is a former Consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital and a Visiting Research Scholar at the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA.

Since 2003 she has been in Cardiff where she runs a retinal clinic and a monthly genetic eye clinic. Her research focuses on ophthalmic genetics and mitochondrial diseases, in particularly in the role of mitochondrial dynamics in the pathophysiology of inherited optic neuropathy. Her lab in The Cardiff Vision Institute focuses on in vitro and in vivo approaches to modelling mitochondrial dysfunction leading to retinal ganglion cell loss and on genes and proteins involved in the regulation of mitochondrial morphology.